Ok then your system is bugging more info please? What version of maya, what os and so on.I personally tested this on maya 6.01 7.0 and maya 8.5 to ensure theres a wide spectrum support. Worked fine on all of them, no matter if i used a manipulator or not.
A possible cause is that your computer is kisyt not fast enough to do this. But i doubt that because i tested on maya 8.5 ple on a really crap machine.
anway heres a wide spectrum answer:
To fix any possible miscommunication:
then to make sure you understand what im saying pressing play is not equal to interactive playback, rather interactive playback need to be taken from [Dynamics] Solvers->Interactive Playback! its play with different options.
To do it another way:
execute: play -record
just in case your more specific:
True, If you draw a marque selection maya stops for a while because it needs some time to fish out the selection list. theres no way around that your computer just isn't fast enough to do that in real time. (this would require a good deal of maya re-engineering to work faster and that would drop support for a lot of cards)
selection and reselecting works fine tough.
To fix any slight pref bugs:
Try renaming your prefs folder, this is all spectrum set options thing so any unallocated pref that craps up will be fixed by this (dont inherit settings from previous version). Clear all custom melscript you have in use by renaming your extra mel folders than switch them on one by one to rule them out, if it happened to work after this.
if it still does not work contact autodesk support!